Hi, Laurie!
I don't know if you can trace your family-tree back to Calfornia,
but it's the 150th anniversary of British Columbia's first Gold Rush
which happened along the banks of the Fraser River.
For those American's unaware, British Columbia [mainland] did not exist
as either a British Colony nor a Canadian province over 150 years ago.
It was Indian/Native territory with only one or two fur trading posts
with a small number of Europeans.
Then...Gold was discovered along the banks of the Fraser River, 9 years
after California's Gold Rush.... Those Californians who came away from
the 1849 Gold Rush with little to show for it, headed north to the Fraser River
to try their luck anew.
Over 10,000 of them flooded that area and established gold-mining towns
like Hope, Spuzzum, Yale & Boston Bar [Many of the American gold miners
obviously came from Massachusetts].
Thousands of Americans [and Chinese] also settled nearby Vancouver Island
to establish businesses catering to the gold miners.
Problem was? There was already an established British colony on Vancouver
Island, including the colonial town of Victoria [pop:400 in the year 1857]
which blossomed into a boomtown of 6,000 in 1858.
Alarmed at the possibility that the large number of American gold miners might try to
annex the mainland gold-mining territory, the Vancouver Island colonial-governor,
James Douglas, helped name and officially proclaim the creation of the
colony of British Columbia, with HM Queen Victoria's blessing in Dec/1858.
BTW, the Fraser River itself was named after a daring British explorer, Simon Fraser,
who canoed most of the length of the river, including some of its deadly rapids,
200 years ago this June and July.